BUSINESS BRIEFS

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 2, 1997

AH: Adia Personnel now Adecco Employment

Redwood City Adia Personnel Services has changed its name to Adecco Employment Services.

The switch follows Adia's 1996 merger with ECCO, a French employment services company. Redwood City-based Adecco said it is the world's largest personnel services organization based on consolidated sales with more than 2,400 offices in 40 countries.

Disney's Ovitz gets

lucrative "parachute'

Los Angeles Departing Walt Disney Co. President Michael Ovitz leaves the company with $38 million in severance pay, but without a $7.5 million bonus he had sought for a year on the job.

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The former talent agent, once heralded as Hollywood's most powerful deal maker, also gets 3 million Disney stock options. Executive pay experts recently valued those from the high $70 million range to $92 million, bringing Ovitz's exit package to $115 million to $130 million.

Court date set

in wine-label suit

Santa Rosa A March 10 trial date has been set in a Kendall-Jackson Winery suit against E&J Gallo Winery over the use of a leaf on the main label of Gallo's Turning Leaf brand.

In the case - in the court of Judge Vaughn Walker in federal District Court in San Francisco - Kendall-Jackson contends that Gallo has infringed on its distinctive packaging of its Vintner's Reserve brand.

Dental care firms'

merger approved

Sacramento The merger of Bio-Dental Technologies Corp. and a Phoenix-based marketer of oral health care products moved forward after shareholders overwhelmingly approved the deal this week.

Under the terms of the transaction, Bio-Dental shareholders will receive 0.825 common shares of Zila stock for each one of the roughly 6.5 million shares of outstanding Bio-Dental stock. As a subsidiary of Zila, Bio-Dental is hoping to increase its 1996 revenue of $33 million if the Food and Drug Administration approves Zila'sOraTest, which is billed as the first oral cancer detection system.

AT&T finalizes

NCR spinoff

New York Telecommunications giant AT&T Corp. said it has distributed more than 100 million shares of common stock in NCR Corp. to AT&T shareholders, finalizing the spin-off of the money-losing computer unit it bought some five years ago for $7.5 billion.

As previously announced, the distribution of 101,437,174.688 shares was on the basis of 0.0625 a share of NCR for each AT&T share outstanding.&lt;

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